DAIRY ASSOCIATION. 297 



hardest year. I had only enough feed for four hundred tons of ensil- 

 age and very little hay in the fall. I doubted whether it was best to 

 use what feed I had and attempt merely to keep my stock alive till 

 spring, or buy feed to make the cows give enough milk to pay for the 

 feed. I wondered if I could make any profit with hay at $13 to $15 

 per ton, alfalfa shipped from Nebraska, bran at $20 to $22 per ton, 

 cotton seed meal at $26 to $28 a ton and pay six hands to do the work. 

 I undertook to give my cows good feed so that they could pay for it, 

 and they did. I bought $1,500 worth of feed and came out with very 

 little pay for my work, but when spring and grass came and we quit 

 feeding, my cows looked well and gave a good flow of milk, which they 

 could not have done had they not been well fed during the winter, and 

 we sold over $100 worth of butter a week for a considerable time, I 

 do not know just what I could have done had I had beef cattle, but I 

 suspect I would have had to sell them to pay for the feed and had noth- 

 ing to make profit with ; but my cows paid for their feed and were 

 ready to make more for me. I advise farmers to go into private dairy- 

 ing. You can churn and make the butter as easily as you can take it 

 to a creamery, if there is one near you, and you do not have to sus- 

 pect the creamery man does not test your milk right; and will have all 

 the skim milk and butter milk to feed your calves and pigs. 



I want to advise you about apparatus for making butter. If neces- 

 sary for a little while, use what you have, but as soon as possible get 

 a good separator and a good churn and when you get tired of a hand 

 separator, use some kind of power and build a suitable room for it. 

 I have used a two-horse tread power for six or seven years, but last 

 spring I got a four-horse gasoline engine and I like it best. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. Patterson: When I first went into the dairy business a man 

 came along and tried to get me to buy a separator. I did not think I 

 needed one, but he was persistent and showed me I was just losing a 

 dollar every day by not getting all the butter fat that the milk contained. 

 If dairying is not rightly conducted it will not pay expenses. So many 

 of our farms are so badly managed, the land just sown and resown in 

 corn until its fertility is all gone; but even with the proper rotation of 

 crops I believe there is more money in dairying than on a common fami. 

 In dairying you get your money every week, while in raising hogs and 

 cattle you have to wait so long before you get your returns and this 

 makes a big difference, so I think the dairy business is preferable. Then 

 dairying does not deplete the land as does ordinary grain raising. 



